Having someone else publish your article is a great way to bring traffic to your website. It’s a chance to get attention from people who may be interested in what you have to offer, but haven’t heard of you yet. Not all articles are published to websites, however. Some are only sent to a newsletter or ezine list. Does it matter whether your article is published on someone’s site versus their newsletter?

The benefits can be different for each, but it’s not something I stress about, personally. The main thing you want from your articles is exposure to a new audience.

Website Publication Benefits

The benefit of having your article published on someone else’s website goes beyond the initial exposure to human visitors. An article on a website usually stays up for years, potentially giving you traffic for years to come. Links in the article may provide you with benefits for your search engine optimization efforts. It’s a pretty good deal when it’s done right.

Newsletter Publication Benefits

The publication of your article in a newsletter has similar benefits, except it may be for a shorter time. How much initial benefit you get depends on how big the list is, how engaged they are and how relevant they find the information you’re sharing.

If it’s a big list, but they send out so many emails that many don’t get opened, your article may get lost in the shuffle, no matter how well written and topical. You have to be careful when choosing newsletters to offer an article to, because some won’t be worth the time.

Some newsletters also get published on websites, so while there’s no guarantee of later visitors finding the article, or of any SEO benefit, you will get that sometimes. Don’t expect it unless you know the newsletter is published on a website as well. A membership with the Directory of Ezines is a shortcut to finding relevant newsletters to check out.

With any newsletter, the main surge of traffic you may get will be on the day the newsletter is sent, with late readers trickling in over perhaps a few days.

Does the Difference Between the Two Make a Difference?

While the extra traffic you can get over time from having an article published on a website is nice, don’t completely rule out newsletters and ezines. Most important is which one will get you in front of the audience you’re after. Getting in front of the right audience can do far more for your online business than any search engine benefits you may get.

Don’t get me wrong. Ranking highly on the search engines for your keywords is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it’s a huge thing. But it can also be short lived and frustrating. Rankings rise and fall, and there’s only so much you can do about it. Build your traffic in other ways, and a drop in rankings won’t be quite the crisis it would be otherwise.

While it pays to keep both the short term and long term benefits in mind, you shouldn’t always sacrifice one for the other. Besides, if you get a good list of newsletter and website owners who are regularly willing to publish your articles, you’ll have a long term benefit already. You’ll be able to write articles and know that you can pull in traffic more or less when you want it, not just when the search engines like you.

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If you pay much attention at all to what Google says or what Internet Marketers talk about, you know that Google just did a big update that effects 11.8% of their queries. Simply put, they’re trying to get rid of sites that offer poor value as they have nothing more than regurgitated content from other sites. They’re tired of the content farms.

The impact has been huge. Ezine Articles has lost huge amounts of traffic, yet they’re one of the best article directories out there. Less known sites have also lost huge amounts of traffic. Many webmasters are concerned about the loss of links to their sites as these changes reduce the value of previously built links.

So naturally all kinds of guides are popping up telling you how to deal with this change. Some free in exchange for an email address, others you have to buy, still others give a free report, then a sales pitch at the end of the report.

What Can You Do?

If this has made your own site drop in rankings, obviously you’re eager to get them back. How this is going to work may depend on how exactly Google did this and if the theory that this is a site rather than page based change is correct. If it’s site based, I suspect it will be more difficult if your site was of the sort specifically targeted. If your site was collateral damage, maybe not so difficult.

I agree with what some have said, which is that this throws a kink into the article marketing routine as used by many people. That doesn’t mean that article marketing is dead, so far as I know. It means you need to think about how you’re doing it to give yourself the right combination of great content for your site, syndicated content and backlinks built.

Time is a huge constraint for most of us. Creating great content takes time, and it’s nice when you can distribute it to article directories after publishing it on your own site. I’ve done a lot of this, but I’m looking at whether I will have the right balance going forward of unique content versus syndicated on my sites. It’s pretty clear that some unique content on a site is a good thing.

Certainly it’s a good time to reconsider things you might be trying such as article spinning, which I’ve long thought was a bad idea. I’ve never liked the idea of faking original content. Autoblogging may also not work so well, but once again, it’s something I haven’t ever recommended, especially as a primary business. I much prefer the slower but more stable results of building my sites more naturally.

It may also be a good time to add in other types of marketing. I keep trying to talk myself into podcasting or making videos – perhaps it’s time. These are actions that you can take which may help you to regain what you may have lost, or may help you build in ways you haven’t manage to build your online business yet.

What Shouldn’t You Do?

Panic. Panicking is absolutely not the right solution.

Don’t rush out to buy one of the new infoproducts just because they say they have a solution to this update. Too many people are rushing products out, but it’s hard to say how all this will sort out. It looks bad for a lot of sites and that’s a major problem for their owners, but you need to have a clearer idea as to what the problem is before you start buying solutions. Know what you’re going to do next and then decide if you need to pay for information on how to best implement your solution.

Did Google Get It Right?

Any time Google makes a really big change like this people are going to debate whether they got it right or not. I have mixed feelings about that myself. I can see how trying to get sites that tend to provide a poor experience out of the rankings might be a good thing overall, but it’s not always easy to target those alone. I don’t doubt there were a number of false positives, sites that should have been left alone but took a big hit anyhow.

The issue is with the good sites that dropped and in some cases the good sites that rose. Blind Five Year Old’s post on the subject has a great example with the old and new searches for “schoolyard bullying,” which now has Wikipedia at the top. Wikipedia is a good site for some things, but as noted in the article, not for a topic like “schoolyard bullying.” The old results were much better.

It would not surprise me at all to see Google tweak things a little over the next few weeks. This is a big change, but that doesn’t mean they can’t adjust it with smaller changes. Take a little time and think about if you need to react and how you should do so. You’ll probably make a better decision if you get more information about the changes first.

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